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Thank you We sneak in contemporary literature on the road

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Eyelash shmoop who were the beatniks The beats were countercultural

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in lots of different ways So that might be the

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first thing you think about when you think of the

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word hipster people who wanted to reject the status quo

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for all sorts of reasons People who were african american

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like james baldwin people who were gay like baldwin again

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or jack kerouac or allen ginsberg people who experimented with

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drugs because they wanted to perceive the world in different

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ways And all of them reflected that in their writing

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what's the significance of the novel on the road by

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jack kerouac So on the road is a road trip

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novel and in that way it's quintessentially american it's very

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typically american but it's also very countercultural and alternative because

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it's about people who kind of want to do drugs

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all the time have sex with whoever they want are

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fed up with their lives So basically the story begins

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when sal paradise who is a stand in for jack

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kerouac divorces his wife he's living with his aunt He

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is fed up with his life so he decides to

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go west like so many americans before him But he

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wants tio by hitchhiking doesn't own a car so going

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on a road trip is going to be a little

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bit difficult along the way he needs dean moriarty who

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is a stand in for jack carax riel friend neal

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cassidy And they travel to chicago They travel to denver

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colorado They travel to san francisco They traveled to mexico

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all across the continent just hoping to find a better

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of thing or a better life but never actually feeling

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as though they find it So sal paradise has to

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keep moving on and on and on It's really important

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and famous because it captures the american dream in a

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big way this sense of restlessness and always wanting to

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move on to something better It's also famous because it

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was a whole new literary style at the time It's

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written in basically a stream of consciousness style which means

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an author spots just kind of spilled onto the page

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Modernise writers were doing not earlier in the century but

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this text was supposedly written great through in three weeks

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on a single typewriter scroll that jet that jack karen

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Adding on between that which happened in nineteen fifty one

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And when the book was actually published in nineteen fifty

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seven it went through several rounds of editing But the

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end result is still something that sounds like a sort

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of crazy person to just talking to you which was

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new and shocking and weird for the people who were

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reading it Andi had a huge influence on writers who

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followed Not just other beats but people as far as

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david foster wallace who will be talking about later today

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And to otto you know often writes these long tense

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like really dense narratives Who were the beatniks who wrote

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on the road And why is it an important text

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